tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9158169.post7442884887021771525..comments2023-06-07T08:21:44.675-05:00Comments on Tim's Thoughtful Spot: The Call of the WeirdTim McGahahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10344033690443344729noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9158169.post-18919392241404530702009-09-05T07:22:01.280-05:002009-09-05T07:22:01.280-05:00Tim,
Thank you for presenting this. It is illumina...Tim,<br />Thank you for presenting this. It is illuminating and intelligent. Our corporatist, anti-intellectual mainstream media always tries to oversimplify ("dummy down") everything it reports on into scenarios of conflict, spectacle, entertainment, and/or "either-or." And so it has done with politics. As we all know, life isn't always an "either-or" situation. Few situations we experience are black or white; most are some shade of gray. I think the media's fixation on only 2 sides to every question has done a great deal of harm and has fostered the terrible polarization we experience today. What you have presented here is dar more accurate and thought-provoking than anything we constantly get from our mainstream media.Jack Jodellhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02165430903903838990noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9158169.post-73496582857991915092009-09-04T20:39:04.178-05:002009-09-04T20:39:04.178-05:00affecting, not affection. I gotta start proofin...affecting, not affection. I gotta start proofin' before submittin'<br /><br />This is getting ridicule-ous :)Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9158169.post-64815383216662176702009-09-04T20:30:58.721-05:002009-09-04T20:30:58.721-05:00Oops my bad. Make that Lyell. What Lyell is to geo...Oops my bad. Make that Lyell. What Lyell is to geology.<br /><br />Can't always bat a 1000.<br /><br />Or rather, can't ever...<br /><br />You could also toss in August Schleicher and linguistics to further the analogy I made and to demonstrate the veritable explosion of the theory of historical development affection many, many fields of inquiry in the mid-nineteenth century.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9158169.post-34871403943958468412009-09-04T20:24:01.346-05:002009-09-04T20:24:01.346-05:00cont...
You're a very smart man. And it has a...cont...<br /><br />You're a very smart man. And it has always been that way. Well, at least since you were a very smart boy, heh.<br /><br />I recommend you take a break from reindoctrinating yourself with the stuff you read in skool to slog through the first 90 pages or so of capital (and a slog it is). I suspect that if you give it a fair suspension of disbelief and enough of your copious synaptic power, you will come to see those pages as you do the bright sunshine through parting clouds.<br /><br />And why do I say this? I say this because Capital is the work which takes the atomic unit of economics, value, and descibes it with the same precision and logical clarity that has made all the other forms of science so appealing to you. Marx is to economics what Darwin is to biology and what Lowell is to geology. And what is interesting beyond that is that these contemporaries were, in this time of foment, largely applying the same basic ideas to revolutionize their respective fields: a new and comprehensive view of the dynamics of historical progression.<br /><br />In Capital, Marx does not write a historical narrative though. Rather, he has earlier taken apart the then existing social relations until he has discerns this atomic unit, value. And then, commencing his opus, he reconstructs everything from that atomic unit showing how it all works. <br /><br />And once you have some grasp of this, you are in a much better situation to make sense of politics. Of the importance and impact Capital has had, one cannot not speak in too grand of terms. <br /><br />To wit, the very intellectual foundations of the libertarianism you fancy come from a desperate effort to refute the analysis in Capital lest it, taken to its logical conclusion, undermine the notion of private property entirely.<br /><br />The closest thing to a bourgeois critique of Marx is by Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk and it dates back to over 100 years ago. While others have criticized small slivers of Marx's work, Böhm-Bawerk's is considered to be "comprehensive". It is astonishing how many footnotes on the "total debunking of Marx" end up leading exclusively to him. In fact, Böhm-Bawerk's work is structured to look exactly like an anti-matter version of Marx, i.e. a three volume Capital and Interest. The actual theory is thin stuff indeed, focusing on the term or period of capital. In some ways, it is the exact opposite of Gesell (*another guy who is as inordinately popular among code toads as libertarianism) but equally wrong. I forget who said it but somehow Böhm-Bawerk stepped on Adam Smith somewhere in his writings against Marx and one of the neo-Smithians referred to him as "that bombastic flea, Böhm-Bawerk".<br /><br />Do you know what else the bombastic flea "contributed?"<br /><br />He is one of the "founders" of "Libertarian Economics" (the so-called Austrian School)...<br /><br />Modern Libertarian political philosophy was born in exactly the same way as Eugene. It was "discovered" and funded by capitalism as a bought-and-paid-for ideological "criticism" of Marxism. The first important "Libertarian" institutions in America (in the early 1930's - imagine that! during the Great Depression... what a coincidence?) started out by popularizing the bombastic flea's work and distributing his books, free, to libraries and schools.<br /><br />It is one hell of a story but the whole "Libertarian" racket was more crooked than a Ponzi scheme, absolutely manufactured out of whole cloth to oppose socialist ideology and nothing more. It is a designer theory that was designed to fulfill the needs of a free market. The demand was there for an oppositional theory to Marxism, but no supply. You can imagine how high the price was... although it fell right back down to its value when the Universities solved the crisis of production. <br /><br />But then none of this last part is news any longer, if you read the things linked earlier...<br /><br />Cheers -Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9158169.post-53526993013516253662009-09-04T20:23:29.557-05:002009-09-04T20:23:29.557-05:00Hi again Tim,
I kinda like this quote from old Je...Hi again Tim,<br /><br />I kinda like this quote from old Jerry:<br /><br />"Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for western civilization as it commits suicide."<br /><br />..but I rather doubt I like it for the same reasons he said it.<br /><br />I'd not seen that chart before although I am familiar with some of the other two-axis political charts. Mostly they are, IMO, end to end baloney.<br /><br />I'm not sure I'll conclude much differently on his either. To say communists are "state worshipers" betrays something that is one of two things, either a striking ignorance of the subject or an agenda driven desire to project subterfuge.<br /><br />Of course most people wouldn't see it that way. But then most people haven't made any effort to think for themselves about topics so far outside the American catechism. <br /><br />Politics is about economics. And despite the liberal v. conservative CRAP about "issues" (as though politics were like grocery shopping...just pick your favorite :issues"), that IS the root of politics. <br /><br />The modern nation state as a construct is only a couple of hundred years old. Indeed the modern nation state did not cover the whole of the globe until just before your lifetime commenced. So, IMO, to place this construct as one of the key axes seems rather pedestrian.<br /><br />If we look back to the very earliest notions of what it means (meant) to be a state, we can see that, like democracy itself, it was never meant to be anything positive for the people.<br /><br />Democracy's history dates back to the Greeks and its founding principles were to create elite and quite controlled social and political arrangements.<br /><br />The understanding of the "State" as growing directly out of the "Police" and the army, and intended for no other purpose than to enforce property dates back much, much farther. The original organization of Athens is based on military districts which not only yield a fixed quota of troops but also revenues to fund mounted archers who are slaves - the first police force. The rule of the demos, i.e. "democracy", grows directly from this. The innovation here, is not the "fairness" of the Athenian democracy. In fact it is a huge step backward from the Greek Tribes which were based on consensus and one vote for each adult. In place of that, the "Democracy" recognizes only one out of every 32 people as citizens. It's key is not its incorporation of the people (except for those formally so defined), but in its organization of the state, and through it, the guarantee of personal property, most importantly in slaves.<br /><br />This is yet another example of a thing we see through a thick fog, whereas those who came before us had a much clearer view.<br /><br />Meanwhile, here in - as Che put it - The Belly of the Beast (AKA teevee land), we somehow think that the history has been written and that we understand it.<br /><br />"Communism is dead."<br /><br />That's a common refrain that is profoundly ahistorical and even more profoundly shortsighted. 150 years is not history, it is a teevee show.<br /><br />And for old Jerry to point to the statist axis, even though it made more sense in the time when he was working on his dissertation, is pure folly. <br /><br />Communism, in its early exertions which we have witnessed since Marx (and actually all through history prior, albeit in its primitive or Utopian forms), has not been able to escape the state any more that it has been able to avoid capitalist predation. To claim it has come in gone is to deny witnessing a birth rather than to be reflecting on a "death." <br /><br />The state, as far as Marxists are concerned, will go the way of private property. So long as one exists, so shall the other.<br /><br />Of course here, the discussion is almost never about economics because virtually no one knows anything about the subject. And those who do know and do run things economically are too much in agreement for economics to be very useful as fodder for the theatrics that comprise the discourse in our time and place.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com